A thousand darknesses

Rejects the views that only survivors' testimonies can represent the Holocaust, while works of fiction inevitably distort it. Argues that the boundary between written testimonies and literary works on the Holocaust is blurred, since many memoirists have distorted their experiences, either deliberately or unintentionally; on the other hand, no work of fiction dealing with the Holocaust can dispense of facts and historical truth. Examines works by six survivors that stand halfway between eyewitness accounts and fiction: stories by Tadeusz Borowski; texts by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Piotr Rawicz, and Imre Kertész; and "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski. These texts are juxtaposed to works by postwar non-witness writers: Keneally's "Schindler's Ark" and its film version, "Schindler's List", by Spielberg; Wolfgang Koeppen's novel "Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch"; works by W.G. Sebald; and "Der Vorleser" by Bernhard Schlink. The latter texts, although being works of fiction, took much from eyewitness accounts and documents. Questions the privileging of autobiography over fiction, and endorses imagination as a form of truth-telling. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)